NOTE: Most stat-keepers do not calculate passing YPA properly! They ignore sacks, as if these game-changing plays don't matter! If you want to know why our passing yards per attempt figures are more accurate than any others you'll find anywhere, see the information below the chart.)

PASSING YARDS PER ATTEMPT UPDATE

Success in the passing game almost always leads to success on the football field. The 2009 season was no exception. The Saints won the first Super Bowl in franchise history, after a season in which they finished No. 2 in Passing YPA. Perhaps more importantly, New Orleans finished the year No. 1 in Passer Rating Differential. In other words, they dominated the passing game on both sides of the ball more than any team in the NFL.

San Diego and its quarterback Philip Rivers were slightly more effective than Drew Brees and the Saints passing the ball in 2009. The Chargers failed to make an impact in the postseason. But their league-best passing attack did result in a 13-3 record, the second best mark in franchise history.

Meanwhile, look out for Houston. An expansion franchise in 2002, the organization has struggled to find its way in the NFL. But the Texans enjoyed the first winning season (9-7) in their brief history in 2009. Naturally, you find the reasons for success in the passing game: Matt Schaub and the Texans boasted a Super Bowl caliber passing attack with an impressive 7.51 YPA. That kind of effectiveness gives Houston a Super Bowl-caliber passing attack ... provided the team's young defensive stars can finally live up to expectations.

Most every team yards per attempt figure you see out there is wrong! Or, at the very least, it's not calculated properly. Go to ESPN.com, Yahoo Sports, wherever. Basically, a lot of places like that will publish a net yards figure and then, in the next column, the yards per attempt figure will be based upon gross passing yards. The math just doesn't add up, at least not when you use the published figures.

So here's what you'll find from the Cold, Hard Football Facts. We use only NET passing figures to determine yards per attempt. This is gross passing yards, minus yards lost via sacks, divided by passsing attempts. If we were merely looking at individual quarterbacks and their yards per attempt, we might (might!) be inclined to use gross passing yards, so as not to penalize the quarterback if he has a sieve of an offensive line.

Sacks count as pass attempts

Our yards per pass attempt is a "Quality Stat" – a stat that has a direct correlation to victory. So we're looking at team data. After all, it's teams that win and lose football games.

There's more to our calculations, though. Instead of just dividing the net passing yardage by pass attempts, we add in the number of sacks to the attempts column. We believe this gives a far more accurate gauge of a team's ability to pass the ball. After all, when a QB is sacked, it's because he was attempting to pass. Why shouldn't this attempt to pass count as an attempt?

For example, if a quarterback attempts 10 passes for 100 yards, his yards per attempt is 10.0 YPA. Easy enough, right? But what if that QB was sacked three times and lost 22 yards? Suddenly, the team's passing YPA is a mere 6.0 (78/13).

Hey, the team only gained 78 net yards when attempting to pass. And those 3 sacks came on attempts to pass. So, to accurately measure a team's ability to pass, that's our formula: